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The field I sow is twelve days’ journey round; Berecynthian land;Aesch. Niobe, Frag. 153, Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. p. 52. The speaker is Tantalus. The Berecynthian land is near Mount Berecynthus in Phrygia. if this speaker was not merely a lover of agriculture but also a lover of his fellow men, he would find more pleasure in sowing the field which could feed so many men than in sowing that little plot of Antisthenes’See Xen. Symposium, 3. 8, where Antisthenes says that his land is hardly enough to furnish sand to sprinkle Autolycus with before wrestling. which would hardly have been big enough for Autolycus to wrestle in; but if [he meant]: I sow all this in order that I may subjugate the whole inhabited world, I deprecate the sentiment.The text is very corrupt, but the general course of the argument based upon the lines supposed to have been spoken by Tantalus may very well have been what is given in the translation. If the rich and powerful use their advantages for the common good of men, they are worthy of the philosopher’s attention, but not so if they use their resources for purely selfish ends. See critical note, p. 42. And yet Epicurus, who places happiness in the deepest quiet, as in a sheltered and landlocked harbour, says that it is not only nobler, but also pleasanter, to confer than to receive benefits. For chiefest joy doth gracious kindness give.Probably an iambic trimeter. See Kock, Com. Att. Frag. iii. p. 495. Surely he was wise who gave the Graces the names Aglaïa (Splendour), Euphrosynê (Gladness), and Thalia (Good-cheer); for the delight and joy are greater and purer for him who does the gracious act. And therefore people are often ashamed to receive benefits, but are always delighted to confer them; and they who make those men good upon whom many depend confer benefits upon many; and, on the contrary, the slanderers, backbiters, and flatterers who constantly corrupt rulers or kings or tyrants, are driven away and punished by everyone, as if they were putting deadly poison, not into a single cup, but into the public fountain which, as they see, everyone uses. Therefore, just as people laugh when the flatterers of Callias are ridiculed in comedy, those flatterers of whom Eupolis saysFrom the Flatterers, by Eupolis; Kock, Com. Att. Frag. i. p. 303. No fire, no, and no weapon, Be it of bronze or of iron, Keeps them from flocking to dinner, but the friends and intimates of the tyrant Apollodorus, of Phalaris, and of DionysiusCruel tyrants of Cassandreia, Acragas, and Syracuse respectively. they bastinadoed, tortured, and burned, and made them for ever polluted and accursed, since the former had done harm to one man, but the latter through one, the ruler, to many. So the philosophers who associate with persons in private station make those individuals inoffensive, harmless, and gentle towards themselves, but he who removes evil from the character of a ruler, or directs his mind towards what is right, philosophizes, as it were, in the public interest and corrects the general power by which all are governed. States pay reverence and honour to their priests because they ask blessings from the gods, not for themselves, their friends, and their families alone, but for all the citizens in common; and yet the priests do not make the gods givers of blessings, for they are such by nature; the priests merely invoke them. But philosophers who associate with rulers do make them more just, more moderate, and more eager to do good, so that it is very likely that they are also happier.
